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Compact but packs a wallop: This is the conventional description of Mary Jo White, a former top U.S. prosecutor selected by President Barack Obama to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If confirmed by the Senate -- and there is little doubt that she will be -- the 65-year-old White will become the first former federal attorney ever to take the helm of the agency. White also will be the highest-profile former prosecutor at the panel commission since Ferdinand Pecora was appointed commissioner in 1934.

Expectations are high that she will get tough on the Street and silence critics who claim that the Obama administration let the big fish responsible for the 2007 credit collapse get away with high crimes and misdemeanors. However, White at times has been as cozy with the Street as she has been tough with it. So it remains to be seen if she will live up to the current hype.

White was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 2002 -- one of the most prestigious postings in the Justice Department. The crime fighter helped pack the slippery Mafia godfather John Gotti off to jail after he had beaten three previous prosecutions. White's team also successfully prosecuted big-time terrorists and a laundry list of Wall Street malefactors. Most memorable for investors was the prosecution of the former Prudential-Bache Securities for misleading 120,000 investors about the riskiness of $1.4 billion in oil and gas limited partnerships from 1983 to 1990. That case resulted in probation and a stiff settlement for the firm rather than a drawn-out court battle -- a template later followed by the SEC.

Obama has raised expectations that White will transform the SEC from a bumbling Barney Fife wielding an unloaded six-shooter into a tough, decisive force that protects the public instead of coddling the big financial firms.

White, because of her five-foot height and her short hairstyle, bears a striking resemblance to actress Linda Hunt's Hetty Lange on NCIS Los Angles. Lange is forceful and never intimidated. Mary Jo White strikes people who know her in much the same way.

"She is neither an ideologue nor a pushover -- I think her experience is too broad and deep for her to be pigeonholed," says Viet Dinh, a Georgetown Law School professor. Dinh, an independent director of Barron's parent, News Corp., hired White to advise him and other independent directors when conducting an internal investigation of the phone-hacking scandal involving News Corp.'s London-based News of the World.

White has played big-time defense as well as offense. When she left the U.S. attorney's office and became head of the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, she went to bat against the government for a list of big-name financial-sector clients, most notably Bank of America's Ken Lewis.

She also has worked in the financial sector, having served as a Nasdaq director from 2002 to 2006. Tom Joyce, the CEO of Knight Capital, was one of her colleagues. His firm last year lost $461.1 million in 30 minutes owing to a computer glitch, pressuring the SEC after years of dithering to crack down on high-speed computerized trading.

The SEC had been improving by degree prior to her selection. Robert Khuzami, who recently stepped down as director of enforcement at the agency, is credited with bringing to it energy and focus, resulting in 734 enforcement cases against Wall Street malefactors in 2012, the second-highest number in its history. Penalties totaled $2.2 billion.

The agency was criticized, however, for often settling cases with big Wall Street firms with wrist-slapping fines, rather than taking them to trial where the financial stakes would have been larger. (The SEC brings civil actions; the Justice Department handles criminal complaints.) Khuzami was a star prosecutor under White in the Manhattan office from 1991 to 2002, and at the SEC he appeared to have been following the game plan she established in the Prudential-Bache case.

A PROPOSED CHANGE in the taxation of financial instruments contained in a "discussion draft" released on Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican, would increase costs for everyone, including mom and pop, says lawyer Andie Kramer, an expert on financial products and derivatives in the New York office of McDermott Will & Emery. Stock options, swaps, you name it -- all would be marked-to-market at year end, and gains would be taxed as ordinary income, even if the positions remained open. Mutual funds, insurance companies, and short-sellers also would be affected by the proposal, which seeks to end disparate tax treatment for differing derivatives, a situation that currently lends itself to complex tax-avoidance schemes.

Parts of the draft are confusing. Camp has put it out on the committee's Website for the world to read and comment on. If you own an option or derivative product, read it and write Camp.